I greatly enjoyed your cover story, ‘Telecoms in Africa – The new era begins’ – (African Business, May 2010 issue) for the insights it provided regarding a sector that is now so crucial to Africa’s economy. It is so very crucial that you have to wonder how we ever got by with our antiquated land-line networks before the mobile revolution came to Africa. Little more than 20 years ago, the mobile phone was simply a dream.

But while Africa has wholeheartedly embraced the mobile phone and the huge benefits it brings to society, we still do not have a single mobile phone manufacturing factory on the continent, nor even an assembly plant. Yet we mine the coltan that is used in each and every mobile phone. You would have thought that given the huge market for these devices in Africa, the raw materials we possess and the plentiful labour we can provide, one of the major electronic companies would have set up a subsidiary or an African entrepreneur built a factory to make handsets by now, rather than continuing to import them.